In his most recent postEvert Pot talks about jCard, a JSON-based format that was recently approved to serve up VCard personal information data in an easier-to-parse format.

I'm a big fan of this format. vCards have been around since 1995, and even though we've had a pretty significant update in 2011 in the form of vCard 4.0, the format is still complicated to parse, has a number of problems that go all the way back to the early days. [...] The biggest problem with vCards, is that upon a first glance, the format seems extremely easy to parse and generate with just a couple of string manipulation functions. When you dig deeper into the specifications though, you'll notice that it's actually really complex and hosts a ton of edge cases.

He includes an example of how to generate the jCard format using the Sabre/Object and the resulting output, both in the traditional vCard format and the new jCard structure.

In this new tutorial from Tutorialzine.com, Martin Angelov shows you how to combine a bit of PHP, CSS3 and HTML to create a more functional "About" page for your site that shares contact information in multiple formats.

In this tutorial, we will be creating a simple about page that is powered by PHP, HTML5 and CSS3. It will present your contact information to your visitors, with an option for downloading it as a vCard (useful for importing it in third party applications). You can use today’s example as a placeholder for your upcoming personal website, or as an actual about page.

He includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to get it put together. The PHP is used to store the contact details and, based on a flag in the GET request (easily modifiable to any other method, like a HTTP header) it returns the basic page, a JSON set or a vcard of the contact data. The page also includes spots for linking to Facebook and Twitter accounts.